The 2015 Musicians Showcase begins

MAD ABOUT THEM: Judges and the crowd were all about last year's Showcase winner, Mad Nomad.

At long last, the 2015 Arkansas Times Musicians Showcase kicks off this Thursday, Jan. 29, at Stickyz, and will continue every Thursday night throughout February. The deal is this: Four bands perform in front of a panel of judges, and the audience gets a vote, too. The winners of each round then go on to perform at the finals in March. This year's esteemed panel of judges includes local artists and musicians Mitchell Crisp, Derek Brooks, Shayne Gray and Joe Holland (representing the winning band from last year's showcase, Mad Nomad).

Each week will also feature a distinguished local luminary as a guest judge, including Spero, Maxwell George, Bijoux, John Willis, Matt White and Sean Fresh. In addition, there will be hosts from all your favorite shows on KABF-FM, 88.3, who are partnering with us for the first time this year to make the showcase great.

The prize package includes cash, a Riverfest set on the main stage, a spot at Valley of the Vapors, a set at the 2015 Arkansas State Fair, four hours recording time at Blue Chair Studio, a $350 gift certificate to Jacksonville Guitar, a T-shirt package from States of Mind Clothing, a gift certificate to Trio's Restaurant, and a celebration party (and drink named after you) courtesy of Stickyz and Revolution. Past winners range from Ho Hum and The Big Cats to 607 and Velvet Kente.

The show on Thursday starts at 9 p.m. and admission is $5.

Here are your first-round semifinalists:

Secondhand Cannons

Little Rock alt-rock five-piece Secondhand Cannons, who play confident, three-chord power pop in the tradition of The Cars, were all set to play last year's showcase when their plans were sidelined by a last-minute medical emergency. They dropped out, but the incident has apparently only strengthened their resolve. They've been scheduled first this year, appropriately, and will start things off as they should've been able to this time last year.

Open Fields

Open Fields make hypnotic, slow-building psych-rock filtered through prismatic layers of reverb and delay. In their own words, they "are green places without fences, the pull between magnets of opposite poles, blank spaces waiting for you to tell what you know, the energy around people whose minds are ready to change and grow."

Redefined Reflection

"What started as a group of three friends dreaming about making music and touring nationally is now becoming a reality," Redefined Reflection claim on their website. The band's influences, they write, include Metallica, Sublime, Led Zeppelin, Pantera, Black Sabbath and, maybe most tellingly, Evanescence. They found their singer, Brittney Waddle, on Facebook a couple of years ago and have gone on to fund their first EP on Kickstarter and to produce a bleak but highly professional music video for a song called "Violent."

Consumers

Sherwood band Consumers make Ozzfest-ready alt-metal heavy on riffs and Incubus-style esotericism. They wear fake moustaches in press photos and have a song called "We Exist!" On their Facebook page they recently relayed the accurate assessment of a stranger that they sounded "like Mars Volta with Geddy Lee singing." To this, they say, "Too cool!!!!"

Showcase continues with The Fox Blossom Venture, John Willis, Dead End Drive and Bombay Harambee. /more/

Times readers select their favorite local watering holes and drinks. /more/

After a couple of years of local and rising national acts playing in the Stickyz Music Tent underneath the Broadway Bridge, the venue-within-a-venue will make a move east this year from the tent to an outdoor stage near the Clinton Presidential Center. /more/

With the weather on the verge (we hope) of a sustained period of just-rightness, this week we examine the best places to eat or drink outside. In selecting what follows, we looked for good views, large seating areas and spots that, even if they didn't satisfy the first two criteria, still steadily draw crowds. /more/

Arkansas Times is calling for your Green Day tributes! Express your fandom with a poem, sculpture, painting, photo or song to win two tickets to see the band at Verizon Arena March 8, 2017.

The Stockbridge, Ga. band that penned "Shine," "December" and "The World I Know" is on tour in support of its ninth studio album, "See What You Started by Continuing," and we've got two tickets to give away to a concert this Saturday at Choctaw Casino in Pocola, Okla., 8 p.m.

A Q&A with poet Davis McCombs

Most Shared

Next week a series of meetings on the use of technology to tackle global problems will be held in Little Rock by Club de Madrid — a coalition of more than 100 former democratic former presidents and prime ministers from around the world — and the P80 Group, a coalition of large public pension and sovereign wealth funds founded by Prince Charles to combat climate change. The conference will discuss deploying existing technologies to increase access to food, water, energy, clean environment, and medical care.

Plus, recipes from the Times staff.

Sen. Jason Rapert (R-Conway) was on "Capitol View" on KARK, Channel 4, this morning, and among other things that will likely inspire you to yell at your computer screen, he said he expects someone in the legislature to file a bill to do ... something about changing the name of the Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport.

So fed up was young Edgar Welch of Salisbury, N.C., that Hillary Clinton was getting away with running a child-sex ring that he grabbed a couple of guns last Sunday, drove 360 miles to the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington, D.C., where Clinton was supposed to be holding the kids as sex slaves, and fired his AR-15 into the floor to clear the joint of pizza cravers and conduct his own investigation of the pedophilia syndicate of the former first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of state.

There is almost nothing real about "reality TV." All but the dullest viewers understand that the dramatic twists and turns on shows like "The Bachelor" or "Celebrity Apprentice" are scripted in advance. More or less like professional wrestling, Donald Trump's previous claim to fame.

Event Calendar

Most Viewed

Before Pearls breaks its brief silent treatment about Razorback basketball's latest bid to shake off listless irrelevance, we'll spend a word or two on the Belk Bowl, where the football team draws a Dec. 29 matchup with Virginia Tech in Charlotte.